Episode Details

Do more than 90% of Israeli Jews support the genocide of Gaza, i.e. the current “military operation”? Richie Allen doesn’t think so. During my appearance on his show yesterday he challenged me to cite polling data.

Unfortunately, no pollster in Israel will ever ask flat-out: “Do you support the genocide of Gaza?” Nor have any asked a more polite version of the same question: “Do you support or oppose Israel’s current military campaign in Gaza?” (I argue that well over 90% would say they support it, while less than 10% would say they oppose it.)

So we are going to have to extrapolate. Fortunately (though unfortunately for the Palestinians) this is an easy extrapolation. Time’s “What Do Israelis Think of the War with Hamas?” includes the following paragraph:

Poll results were also hawkish when it came to the use of force in Gaza: 57.5% of Israeli Jews said that they believed the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) were using too little firepower in Gaza, 36.6% said the IDF was using an appropriate amount of firepower, while just 1.8% said they believed the IDF was using too much fire power, while 4.2% said they weren’t sure

Let me repeat that. Fewer than 2% of Israeli Jews think the IDF is “using too much fire power” in Gaza.

Richie Allen might argue that those numbers may have changed since the poll was taken in November. But he would be grasping at straws. There is no evidence whatsoever of any significant change. Essentially nobody, I repeat nobody, in Israel is protesting against the IDF’s wholesale massacre of Palestinians. The “left-wing” Israelis are protesting Netanyahu’s failure to get the Israeli hostages returned. But they are completely indifferent to the genocide of Gazans. In fact, “indifferent” is probably the wrong word. To the extent that any Israeli Jews are saying anything about Palestinian suffering and death, they are wildly celebrating it.

This poll wasn’t an outlier. During a previous massacre of thousands of Gazan civilians, 2008’s Operation Cast Lead, “a poll taken the day after the start of the operation showed 81 percent of the Israeli public supporting the operation, with only 12 percent opposed.” Since 20 percent of Israel’s population are non-Jewish Arabs who disproportionately opposed the massacre, that means that virtually the entire Israeli Jewish population supported it. Polls during subsequent “mowing the lawn” operations gave similar results.

So if fewer than 2% of Israeli Jews think the IDF is “using too much fire power” in Gaza, does that mean that Israeli Jews, as a group, are raving genocidal lunatics that need to be dealt with in the same way that mad dogs are dealt with?

That comparison is unfair—to mad dogs. It is also unfair to some of the 140,000 or fewer Jewish Israelis (out of a total population of around 7 million) who, by way of thinking that Israel is “using too much fire power,” may actually oppose the genocide that is being perpetrated in their name. God bless that minuscule minority of non-genocidal Israelis. As for the other 98%…maybe the Jewish Autonomous Oblast would make a good re-education facility.

Extract from my conversation with Richie Allen

Going back to the days I was on radio in Spain, it is morally and it is wrong on every level to take hostages, regardless of who you are. We know what the IDF and the Israeli police have done to the people of Gaza for decades and decades: Reprehensible things, disgusting things, crimes against humanity. But two wrongs don't make a right. And keeping people for months, you know, in terror, because they must be terrified, the hostages. And never knowing when they